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I’ve been talking with my kids a lot lately about selling online. One is interested in selling t-shirts and various branded items. The other is more interested in creating movie and video props and selling those creations online.

In all of my research I’ve concluded that Shopify is by far the cheapest and easiest solution to start with. Time costs money. WooCommerce and Magento are interesting options too since deploying sites is something I’m comfortable with. I am exploring automated deployment of those solutions.

For Shopify, there is nothing to install. Just enter your email address and follow the instructions. I’ll add more details to this post as we get setup. Go ahead and click on the image below to get started.

If you ever need to add or remove Gnome workspaces using a command-line or a keyboard shortcut, here are the basics required to get it going. Gconf is Gnome’s configuration system. It keeps track of many of your computers settings.

The commands

You can see how many workspaces your desktop currently has using this command:

Just change the “6” to the number of workspaces you need. You can increase it to add workspaces, or decrease it to destroy workspaces. Applications in a removed workspace shift left to the first active workspace.

Making it into a command

Below is a command I wrote to easily add ore remove one workspace. Usage: workspace [-add|-remove]

gconftool-2 –set -t int /apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces $((`gconftool-2 –get /apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces`${method}1));
[/code]
You can now use it on the command line and/or make a keyboard shortcut to call the script.

I tested this in Ubuntu 10.10, but it should work in any Linux distribution using a recent version of Gnome.

I’ve been digging around on webOS for a little while, learning how it ticks. I get pretty excited about the possibilities of open source mobile development. Although I haven’t created any official apps yet, I’ve learned some pretty cool stuff.

A few weeks after I got my Palm Pre my All Inboxes mailbox counter got out of sync. If I had any unread mail it would show +5 more than what I had. I think this occurred when I removed an account or had a crash or something. I’ve forgotten the details. Anyway, it was bugging the hell out of me. So today I decided to track it down. To my surprise it wasn’t too hard to figure out. Continue reading “Resetting the All Inboxes counter on your Palm Pre”

Sometimes it’s surprising how many web users don’t know what a web browser is. I don’t know how many times I’ve been helping a customer, relative, etc and said “open a web browser” and their reply is “what is a web browser”. My immediate thought is “DAMN, how in the heck am I ever going to get them through converting a word doc into PDF and uploading it to the WordPress site I just created for them”.

Note: If you happen to be a customer, relative, etc and are reading this, don’t take offense. Trust me, if you were trying to walk me through stuff you do at work every day, you’d be saying “WTF, this guy is an idiot” too.

It usually turns out that they know more about the web than that first response reveals. Their intelligence isn’t the problem. There is a deeper cause. And a lot of times I can rephrase and say “open Internet Explorer”. Or amazingly, if they don’t know what IE is either, I can almost always get away with telling them to “get on the internet” or “go to Google” (or Yahoo, etc).

Google Wave has a lot of potential, and in many ways is already useful despite being in early beta. One problem I’ve seen with many people however is forgetting to check for new waves. Here are a few tools that can help.

Update 3/4/2010: Google has a new Google Wave notification by email feature that you should check out. Other tools are still listed below in case email isn’t your thing.

Jungle Disk is a great tool. If you use it with Ubuntu though, you might have a little trouble getting it to run automatically. It comes as an executable file in gz or deb format for Ubuntu, but there is no clear way to set it up at startup.

Adding it in System > Preferences > Startup Applications doesn’t properly load it into the panel, which confuses it and causes it to constantly pop back up when you try minimize it. This was driving me crazy. What’s more, when shutting down or rebooting, Jungle Disk doesn’t cleanly exit and leaves a few session files laying around. This causes an error about multiple copies running when you try to run it on boot.

Fortunately I was able to work around these quirks. I’m happy to report that Jungle Disk is loading and working as expected now. Here is what I did:

Just replace <vmname> with the name of your guest. On Windows hosts, you’ll need to change the command to “VBoxManage”.

You will most likely want to set the client to sync with a time server after this. On Windows clients, just double click on the time and go to the Internet Time tab. Check the box and choose time.nist.gov (better reliability).

I needed to solve this because QuickBooks Pro 2000 complains about the system time being changed continuously while in multi-user mode.

In a previous post, I wrote about running Synergy on boot in Ubuntu. Synergy also lets you setup keyboard shortcuts for various actions. Below I show how to setup Synergy keyboard shortcuts for switching between computers. Now you can work away without the need to grab the mouse to get from one screen to the next.

You will need to replace “comp1” and “comp2” with your computer names or aliases. These should be listed in the screens section of your synergy.conf. And of course, if you have more than 2 screens, just add more keystroke lines.

Synergy is a great tool that lets you control multiple computers with one keyboard and mouse. If you use Ubuntu, or another linux distro, it may not be entirely obvious how to get synergy to run on boot. Below are the steps I took:

Update July 3, 2010 – I added client installation instructions and headings that hopefully will clarify a few points.